Chapter 5 Mara

I grab the first bit of him I can reach, which turns out to be the back of his trousers.

The step goes clattering down the hole in pieces. Soren goes after it as far as his waistband allows, which is about a foot, and then he jerks to a stop with both my fists knotted in expensive black wool and both my knees smashing into the edge of the fourteenth stair.

He weighs roughly the same as my fridge, and my fridge has never once tried to kill me.

"Don't let go," he says.

He says it like he's asking me to pass the salt. He's hanging in a shaft up to his armpits, one hand clamped on the lip of the twelfth step and the other swatting at nothing, and he sounds bored.

For the record, I know exactly how deep this shaft is. In book two a spy called Gilroy goes down it, and I spent a whole paragraph on how long it takes before you hear the splash. My editor said it was "a lot of splash". She was right. I kept it in anyway.

"I'm not letting go!" I pant. "Swing your other arm up!"

"There's nothing up there to hold."

"There's me!"

"That's what I meant."

Something gives at his hip with a little pop, and a brass button shoots out of the dark and hits me in the forehead.

"Soren, your trousers."

"I'm aware of my trousers."

They're sliding. I'm hanging on to the waistband with everything I've got, and every time he shifts his grip on the stair another inch of black wool slides through my fingers, and then another, and then I'm looking at the top of the most famous backside in romantic fantasy.

There are fan accounts for this backside. There's a TikTok audio.

It's pale. It's got a dimple on the left cheek.

I didn't write the dimple. Nobody asked me about the dimple.

"Let go of the trousers," he says through his teeth, "and take my wrist."

"If I let go of the trousers you'll fall!"

"If you don't, I'll fall out of them."

A maid comes round the turn of the stair above us with an armful of folded sheets. She's about eighteen, freckled, with ginger curls escaping a cap, and she stops dead. From where she's standing, I'm on my knees with both hands down the back of the Duke of Duskryn's trousers and his bare bum is pointing at the ceiling.

She screams. Outside the window, a pigeon falls off the ledge.

"Get help!" I yell.

"Get Stroud," Soren says, much more reasonably.

"STROUD!" the maid shrieks. Then, trying to be useful, she throws a sheet at me. It hits me in the face.

I can't let go to take it off, so I wear it. It's like being a very small, very panicked ghost. Boots come thundering up the stairs below us and a voice I'd know anywhere roars, "Hold on, my lord!"

Stroud's moustache arrives first, and then the rest of him, two stairs below the hole. He gets both hands round Soren's wrist and heaves. I heave on the trousers. Soren comes up out of the dark like a cork out of a bottle and comes down face first across the stairs between us, with his trousers round his knees and his entire bare backside on display to me, Stroud, the maid and the portrait of his aunt Hester.

Dukes, it turns out, don't wear anything under their trousers.

I'd love to blame somebody else for that. I wrote it in book one, chapter nine. I was very pleased with myself. I may have giggled.

I drag the sheet off my head. The maid has both hands over her eyes with her fingers spread as wide as they'll go. Stroud is studying a crack in the wall like it owes him money.

Soren gets up. He does it slowly and with enormous dignity, hauling his trousers up with one hand and holding them shut in his fist where the button used to be. There's a cobweb hanging off his eyebrow. He turns round and stares at me.

"I saved your life," I tell him.

"You caused the fall."

"I warned you about that step!"

"Then you turned round."

"To ask a perfectly normal question about home maintenance!"

The maid snorts through her fingers.

He keeps staring. His chest is going up and down, and his eyes are very dark and very silver and absolutely locked on my face, and I know this moment. I've written this moment so many times I could do it in my sleep, and I have, during NaNoWriMo. Near-death experience, adrenaline, gorgeous man gazes at the woman who dragged him out of the jaws of death and realises he can't live without her.

"Right," I say, holding up a hand. "I know what's happening. It's adrenaline. You're feeling things. Ignore them, they'll wear off in about twenty minutes, it's basic science."

"Madam," he says, "you've had your hands in my trousers longer than any woman in Duskryn, and I've never enjoyed anything less."

The maid drops the rest of the sheets.

Stroud clears his throat. "Shall I tell Fenwick to have the step mended, my lord?"

"Leave the step."

"My lord, you nearly..."

"I know what I nearly did. Leave the step."

I frown at the hole. Why would anyone leave that? Then again, my dad left a broken step on our porch for eleven years rather than admit my mother was right about it, so maybe it's a man thing. Maybe it's a law of physics that holds across dimensions. Men and steps.

The Rose Room is at the top of the stair, and oh, I'd know it anywhere. Pink silk walls. Bedposts carved like climbing roses. A cushioned window seat over the orchard. I built this room for Evelina. Chapter twelve, she sits in that window seat and cries for three pages after Soren humiliates her at the Harvest Ball. Three pages. My editor wanted two. I fought for three.

Now Evelina's in the east wing, Soren's shown me his bum, and I'm the one standing in her room.

"You'll stay here," says Soren from the doorway.

"For how long?"

He shuts the door in my face. A key grinds.

I grab the handle and rattle it. "You can't lock me in!"

"The door's oak," he says through it. "The lock's Caravel steel. The key's in my pocket."

"Your trousers don't have pockets. I've had an extremely close look."

There's a long silence on the other side of the door. Then footsteps going away down the corridor, uneven, a man walking while holding his trousers up.

I lean my forehead on the oak.

All right, inventory time. I'm starving, because half a slice of toast off the floor isn't breakfast, it's a cry for help. I've got mud drying on both knees and a mark on my forehead in the shape of a ducal button. My niece Poppy turns five on Saturday, and I promised her a cake shaped like a unicorn, and I have never baked anything in my life that didn't come out of a box with a picture on it, and that's the thought that makes my eyes sting. Not the shaft. The cake.

I cross to the window seat and sit in Evelina's crying spot.

Outside, the orchard is full of apple trees with silver undersides to their leaves, and the light coming through them is a colour I spent three books trying to describe and never got. I tried "amber". I tried "honeyed". A Goodreads reviewer called it "Mara Bell's weird obsession with light" and gave me two stars, and honestly, Brenda, look at it.

I hate this. I hate how much I like it. I've been here half a day, two hundred people have laughed at me, and I'd still rather sit in this window than at my desk.

So I need to leave, today, right now, before I start liking it more.

Every portal book I've ever read has the same rule. You go home by the same door you came in. I came face down in a flower bed, so face down in a flower bed is where I'm going.

I get up and go to the mirror.

It's a big oval mirror in a gilt frame carved with roses, hanging beside the wardrobe. In book two, Soren uses the passage behind it to sneak into Evelina's room at midnight. My editor cut the entire scene and wrote "too much, even for you" in the margin. I had that page framed. It's over my desk.

I count three roses down the left side of the frame and press the third.

The mirror clicks and swings out on a breath of cold, dusty air.

"Thank you, past me," I whisper. "You absolute weirdo."

The passage is black as the inside of a wardrobe and so narrow my shoulders brush both walls. Thin stripes of daylight leak through cracks in the stone. I go barefoot, one hand on the wall, counting turns out of my own head. Left at the cracked flagstone. Down eleven steps. Right at the bit where the wall gets damp.

Something with far too many legs drops onto my top lip.

I spit, slap my own face twice, spin round and walk into the wall. A curtain of cobweb comes down over my head like a wedding veil. I stand there in it, breathing through my nose, and then I stub my toe on absolutely nothing.

"Fuck!" I hiss into my elbow.

There's a square of light ahead, down low at ankle height. A little iron grate, where the passage runs past the back of the best bedroom in the east wing.

Somebody's talking on the other side of it.

I crouch. Through the bars I've got a slice of floorboard, the clawed foot of a chair and a pair of grey boots crossed at the ankle. The voice is soft and unhurried. It's a man reading aloud to himself, savouring every word.

"Soren Ravelle had never been afraid of anything."

Every hair on my body stands up at once.

That's my sentence. That's the last thing I typed before the coffee went in. I stared at it for forty minutes at three in the morning on Larch Street, and then the laptop died with it still on the screen. Nobody has read it. Nobody could have read it. My editor hasn't even read it, and she reads everything, including my texts, which she corrects.

Severin Hollis laughs softly, to nobody, and the grey boots uncross.

A hand clamps over my mouth from behind, and a body presses hard against my back.